Archive for the ‘steam’ tag

Earlier this week the post-apocalypse FPS Earth: Year 2066 was withdrawn from sale on Steam. The game had come under fire from fans and journalists alike on account of being severely underdeveloped even for an Early Access title, and misleading players about its rudimentary and broken state on the product page. This came to a head on the sixth of May when Valve dubbed the game a scam and removed all mention of it from the service.

Earth: Year 2066 isn't the only steaming plate of rubbish served to players through Steam lately. This has been highlighted by Escapist Reviews Editor Jim Sterling, who has spent the past few months slowly shovelling his way through the mounting pile of excrement which alongside 2066 include the likes of Overcast: Walden and the Werewolf, the multiplayer FPS Rekoil, and Day One: Garry's Incident. All as part of an effort to demonstrate that Steam needs better quality control.

I absolutely loathe the optical drive. The only times I've felt remotely attached to this historically flaky device is the first time I used one 20 years ago, when I got my first CD burner, and maybe when they finally started using SATA cables and not mile-wide IDE monstrosities.

Since its announcement and subsequent inclusion as a pre-requisite to play Battlefield 3, EA’s re-branded online store, Origin, has been causing plenty of discussion. Opponents argue that Steam already serves as an online digital distribution service, as well as a match-making system, day-one DRM system and game browser; with Steam already providing these services, why must EA force Origin on us?

Paul, Clive and Joe discuss the finer points of whats been going on in the world of gaming. With bonus hats.

First on the rather hastily sketched out agenda is the news that Valve is going to allow players to trade TF2 hats for games on Steam. It seems like a bizarre decision on the face of it but Clive wonders if the move could be a preamble to game trading on Steam.

It's podcast time, so grab your earphones and pump up the volume for another series of rants and conversations from the bit-tech team. This time Joe and Alex are joined by new team member Paul Goodhead as he makes his Gaming Podcast debut, plus Matthew Lambert who has joined for a few weeks of work experience.

What do Matthew and Paul think about working with at bit-tech and how have the team coped with the ejection of England from the 2010 World Cup? We guarantee you won't find out in this podcast, because we don't talk about it!

Instead, we talk about other far more interesting things - like the merits and faults of APB's in-game advertising, the on-going Steam sale and playing games as an atheist. See? Interesting!

On top of that we've got the usual competition and reader mail stuff, all finishing up with what Alex oh-so-nicely refers to as "the worst end to a podcast we've ever done."

Use the links below to listen to the podcast, which was recorded on Shure microphones, supported by SteelSeries and features music by Brad Sucks.

Now I have to be careful handling this claim, because it's dangerous stuff - we're talking weapons grade flamebait here. We're way past UN inspectors; if Dubya was still president, I'd be looking for a cave to hide in and thinking every shadow in the sky was a fleet of Apaches coming to blow me to kingdom come.

Valve, PC gaming's last, best hope, recently made the claim that for its software, "the Mac is five times more stable than Windows," in terms of minutes played versus number of crashes.

It's not just some Valve underling saying this, either - it's Gabe Newell himself, in a US podcast called The Conversation.

Value. It’s a funny word, and never more so when applied to the IT industry. In fact it’s so tricky to place in this fast-moving online world that it’s usually only spoken of as “perceived” value and that’s about as accurate as we can get. Saying a piece of software - be it a game or operating system - is good value is even more of a convoluted statement.

How do you compare one piece of software to another? Features? Price? The space it takes up on your hard drive? How would you predict how well a product might sell and factor that into the pricing?

For most of us it comes down to cold hard cash and whether we can find something that’s as good or better, for less, or even for free. However, only a handful of companies have grasped the fact that if you lower the price of software enough, sales will skyrocket so high, they’ll make many times more profit than if they priced it twice as much, however popular the software may be.

The colossus which is the bit-tech gaming podcast may be slow to wake after the excitement of new year, but when it gets going then there's little that will stop it!

Which is our lame way of saying that we're sorry the first podcast of 2010 is a bit late, but that we hope it's exciting enough to make up for it. It should be anyway, with discussion covering all the games we're looking forward to next year, the merits and flaws of Steam and a whole batch of reader mail.

There's also a story that Harry tells about Joe which is totally made up and which nobody should listen to or believe. Says Joe.

On top of that we've got the usual Guess The Screenshot competition - though it's not the only competition we have on bit-tech at the moment by a long way. Check out the Competitions Hub for more chances to win prizes.

Use the links below to listen to the podcast and be sure to subscribe in iTunes to make sure you don't miss any future casts! Oh, and let us know your thoughts in the forums.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the SiN games and it isn’t just because of the boobs in it. The original SiN was released around the same time as I started to move from being regular gamer to a real hardcore enthusiast. I’d been playing games most of my life, but it was around that time that I really started to get involved in games as a serious hobby.

That’s not to say that the original SiN was a great game though, far from it. It was buggier than a hobo’s mattress, uglier than the brown stains there-upon and cruder than the manners of the owner. It did however have an incredibly alluring and bountifully endowed villainess though, plus a lot of swearing and explosions and that was enough for my brother to cave in and buy it.

While the low-poly cleavage definitely helped sustain my attention in the game when I started playing it shortly after my brother the thing that really grabbed my interest was the branching storyline. Every time I played through the game it seemed different and I probably played it a good ten or so times (each time with God mode on though as it was a horrendously difficult game). Levels linked together intricately and by completing optional objectives early in the game you could end up visiting wholly new locations and exposing new plot lines later. One game might see you assaulting Elexis Sinclaire on her off-shore oil rig, or her underground geothermal plant, while others had you storm her house or follow her to an observatory.

Part of the reason some individuals get slightly hot-headed online is teamwork, or lack of it. In Left 4 Dead, this primarily involves staying together and helping team mates that have been pounced by hunters or tongued by smokers. If you stray too far ahead or don’t keep up, you’ll usually end up dead and will be pretty unpopular with your team mates.

It could be argued that if you want to take the game this seriously, you should join a clan instead of endlessly calling people noobs and hurling other insults at strangers who are just on for a bit of zombie bashing fun. However, there has been quite a shift in gameplay following the release of the new survival mode update on 21st April which has, if anything, made working as a team even more rewarding and might just change things for the better.